GigaPanBot Controller and Motorized Panorama Head

Rather than cut and paste every single option and feature, I’ll link to their main page (there is an english button on left to translate).

Of particular noteworthiness to me is that it allows bracketing up to 10 shots. Clearly allowing for some amazing HDR panorama captures.

Options Galore

Their site also has many LCD captures to show you all the options dialogues so I won’t bore you with that list or multiple screen captures here as well.  Just one image to show you the UI.

The site link is: http://gigapanbot.com/

The GigaPanBot, Gigapixel Panorama Robot creator says it is a private project and to email if you would like information about how to build one yourself!  I’m sure if you were willing to write a check they might help faster or who knows.  Just speculating!

Finally, the GigaPanBot in action firing off side by side mounted Canon+Telephoto monsters for dual coverage. CRAZY!!!

You’ve got to go to 4 minutes, 20 seconds.  NUTS!

Embedded video below, but here is the direct youtube link if you prefer to watch full screen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXyEMAwWOdk

Spheron HDR Video camera footage

Spheron HDR video – footage from SpheronVR AG on Vimeo.

I would have LOVED to have seen some dramatic backlit scenes as examples.  I was most interested in the lighting examples around the 3 minute mark in the above video because of the way you can relight shadows due to the latitude in the file/capture.

Full Spheron Press Release here: http://bit.ly/bnjShW

Here’s some steps I’ve used for generating some motion/video out of HDR stills. There are many different workflows and I’ll touch on some of them from an overview perspective now. The first one is the workflow I employed for an older clip shot at Eden Gardens State Park in North West Florida. For reference, this is the clip (overview to follow below it).

HDR Video – Eden Gardens 2008 from Michael James on Vimeo.

I shot it with a Nikon D3 with a Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G lens.  It sat on top of a fluid head tripod I use for video work. I also had a shutter release cable attached to the D3. I set the camera to automatic bracketing and once I determined the mid point I switched from aperture priority to full manual so that each of the AEB sequences I was about to fire would be EXACTLY the same.  I determined I would not need to go a full 9aeb and set the D3 to fire off 7 shots with 1EV steps between.  I lowered the settings of the camera to shoot JPEG in a size that is larger than HD.

Also of critical importance is locking down white balance.  I chose Daylight here (an obvious choice), but will often dial in an exact Kelvin setting for other lighting situations (although Kelvin WB selection is generally not available in lower end DSLRs).

If I wanted to shoot RAW I would not have been able to have captured the entire tilt move in just over 60 seconds due to the buffer issues, but the lower JPEG setting meant I would never tap out the buffer and could shoot burst after burst easily.  Also, because the steps were only 1EV jumps between each of the 7aeb captures, I was comfortable only shooting JPEG.  I would NOT attempt shooting JPEG for anything larger than 1EV jumps between each shot for this type of approach.  Time was critical here to capture the entire tilt move in a short period of time.  (I shoot RAW for all my other typical HDR workflows, including HDR Timelapse)

The shutter release of the camera was set to continuous so that I could hold down the shutter release cable button with one hand to fire off a full 7 shots at 9fps while keeping my other hand on the tripod handle to make small incremental movements to tilt up after each 7aeb capture.  I do it this way to be quick enough to capture the entire tilt move seen in the video in a little over 60 seconds.

To repeat myself slightly now…, I have the camera ready to capture the brackets in continuous shutter release mode and then prepared for the first AEB capture by aiming the camera slightly below the horizon into the deep shadows.  I then fired off a burst by holding down the shutter release cable button and quickly moved the tripod a very small (unmeasured and done by eye) amount; slightly tilted up for the next capture.  Then again held the shutter release cable button to fire off another 7aeb and repeated this process until the tilt to the sky was complete.  This took all of about one minute to capture.

Back home I dump the images to a folder on the computer and then I launched photoshop to begin the merge to HDR process.  You don’t have to use photoshop as the program to merge to HDR, but back in 2008 when I put this together that was the process I used.  I had a few scripts that I had created that had photoshop merge to HDR and then use custom settings to tonemap out to 16 bit TIFFs.

I employ two alternative workflows these days.  One of which is where I merge to HDR in applications that batch merge and have them save .EXR files for each merge.  Those .EXR files are then imported into either Adobe After Effects or Eyeon Fusion and then I use open source plugins to do the tonemapping in those compositing programs as well as the ensuing optical flow.

But in 2008 those plugins did not exist yet and this process I’m still describing was the workflow I used for the Eden Gardens sequence.

What you see below in the screen shot (click to enlarge or right click and open in a new window) is one of those 7aeb sequences in the merge to HDR dialogue. I’m just showing you that to show you that the dynamic range of the scene was pretty large for an outdoor shot and the sky was blown out when you could see the leaves straight ahead and the leaves were pitch black when the sky was properly exposed.

Like I said, there are several programs out there that can automate the process of merging and tonemapping your brackets and I plan to cover how to use them in this capacity in some future posts and training, but the process I employed here was a home grown merge to HDR and tonemapping recipe I used for Photoshop CS3.  In the end I had 30+ Tiffs from that automated process to then use as the skeleton for an image sequence.  I then take those Tiffs to the next step for optical flow treatment.

Before I move to that next step, here is a larger view (click for larger image) of a single tonemapped frame, along with the 7 shots above the top of it showing you the dynamic range covered for that one image.

The next step I did then was to take the TIFFs into Apple Shake which treats the group of single images like a sequence.  I then used custom settings (see image below; click to enlarge) to expand the number of frames to be created BETWEEN each of the frames I was importing into it.  In other words, Apple Shake was now going to create the frames and guess at the pixel movement between the frames I shot in the garden.  There are other programs such as After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Fusion, etc that can accomplish the same thing with optical flow, but I used Shake in this instance.

I also recropped the image in Shake to match the ratio of HD footage and had it export the sequence as 1080p ProRes footage which I planned to send to Final Cut Pro to add audio and titles (see image below; click to enlarge).

Then I imported the 1080p footage into Final Cut Pro (see image below; click to enlarge) and added sound and some titles to export to various formats (including a web version which exists on Vimeo).

HDR Expose by Unified Color - www.UnifiedColor.com

HDR Expose was just announced this morning over at http://www.unifiedcolor.com/ and is available for purchase on July 12th.

HDR Expose is a new application with a different user interface than HDR PhotoStudio 2 with some new workflows as well.  In addition to batch processing it also now plays nicely with Adobe LightRoom and Apple Aperture.

I was already impressed with HDR PhotoStudio 2 and I’m even happier now with their HDR Expose offering.

More to come later this week…

From Unified Color’s troops…

Excellent to see this work done. The cost of the camera is beyond mere mortals and it is huge, but this is coming to us all in a not so distant future.  Its only a matter of time before we have true HDR Video devices that can tackle difficult exposure issues that exceed current day sensors.

Check this video out!!!  Amazing results!

I’ve toyed with pseudo HDR Video myself, but nothing real time.  This was created with a Nikon D3 shooting brackets one after another, then tonemapped and tweaked in post to create a video like tilt.

HDR Video – Eden Gardens 2008 from Michael James on Vimeo.

Just a quick update. I’ve been out of town shooting, but recently got back and busy editing stuff I shot the weeks prior to heading out of town to shoot.  A few links of recent edits. (which were taken before the huge oil slicks destroyed the beaches)

Again, I shoot rather large and tightly spaced brackets using the promote control.

Seaside Community – Seaside, Florida
http://digitalcoastimage.com/30a/seaside/index.html

Watersound Community – Panama City Beach, Florida
http://www.digitalcoastimage.com/proofs/ws/index.html

Offices of Ocean Reef Resorts – Destin & Seacrest, Florida
http://digitalcoastimage.com/or/index.html

Adaggio Condos – Grayton Beach, Florida
http://www.digitalcoastimage.com/proofs/adaggio/index.html

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This is your chance to help determine where and when my first workshop will likey be (city).

I get emails weekly with questions as to how I’m achieving my results and about my HDR pipeline.  I always defer to just watch the blog for any information about workshops and/or any video training online or off.  That ends up leading to more questions about what kind of training I plan to provide.  One on one, workshops, online training, etc.

I also get asked what books I have read or who I trained under to learn what I know about HDR.  None and nobody are the answers, therefore I can’t point you in any direction to learn what I know.  Everything I have learned and will teach are techniques, tricks and work arounds that I had to figure out on my own.  When I started looking around at what others were teaching about HDR, that was when I first realized how little information there was about pipelines/workflows for commercial work.

If you are looking to just use HDR for artistic images or creating grunge, that is so easy.  Just use Photomatix and ramp up the sliders. There really is no hard core training needed for that genre if you are just looking to create grunge.  There are some teaching how to take it a step further in post, but from what I’ve seen they are actually teaching you photoshop techniques and most of the magic they are teaching are photoshop tutorials, not HDR workflows.

I have no issues with that look personally, but The Robb Report, Architectural Digest, duPont Registry and other publications demand realism.  And the first time you shoot for an interior designer, custom home builder or architect… I can promise you that they will NOT tolerate hue shifts and color saturation issues.  Your repeat business from them will largely be determined by how well you can represent their product.  My experience has been that they expect their work to be represented as precisely as they created it.

Most folks that tap my shoulder requesting training are looking for something different than what they have found out there already. So let me start by addressing interest and needs.  I get requests about my workflow from two sets of photographers.

The first is those that are INTERESTED in creating realistic looking images via my HDR pipeline, but it isn’t do or die for them.  Interests are everything from landscapes to HDR portraits. Most of these photographers who have emailed me are either advanced amateurs or shooting professionally part time.  In either case, they are serious about quality and want a more definitive recipe to get better results.

The other camp is comprised  of photographers either shooting full time and looking to add real estate / architecture to their current services or photographers that are already shooting real estate, but want to know  how I’m tackling all the annoying problems associated with shooting interiors.  This group NEEDS (and wants) all the little tips and tricks in my pipeline from capture to final image to better tackle exposure issues associated with shooting interiors.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

If you would be interested in attending a workshop covering any of my workflows, then shoot me an email and let me know what the nearest city to you is (with an airport).  I’m not against traveling abroad if there is enough interest.  However, if I’m going to fly into an area, I will do so only if there is enough demand in that region to make the time for a workshop.

The last time I posted my email here I got spammed badly so I’ll just ask that you use the email linked at the bottom of my home page http://www.digitalcoastimage.com/

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Yes this will impact HDR as it relates to me and future blog posts, tutorials, etc.  I’ll explain in a moment. LINK to BP OIL SPILL IMAGE (Before it began poluting wildlife and major fishing regions).

I live in North West Florida along the Emerald Coast. I’m a couple hundred miles from where the BP (British Petroleum) oil rig blew up. It has been spewing oil at an alarming rate per day and it is so deep it will take many weeks and possibly months to cap it.  Already predictions are saying this will dwarf the Exxon Valdez disaster. The big difference is the Valdez ship had a finite amount of oil on it.  This uncontrolled hole in the gulf of mexico is gushing many thousands of barrels of oil a day.

NEARLY 40% of United States seafood is fished from the Gulf of Mexico.  Many of the bayous already being hit with oil are major migration points of birds that fly from Canada/North America down south for the winter.

So how is this HDR related?

Because it has already impacted my world and means I’ll be more active on this blog in coming weeks.  Why?  Unfortunately not for positive reasons.  Some background…

About 5 years ago when I was looking at how to best run a real estate photography business I was seeking ways to not have to re-create the wheel with marketing and the constant trolling for new clients.  So when I decided I was going to move from Atlanta to the Emerald Coast of Florida I looked at affluent areas that had expensive homes for sale and beach rentals (high end trophy properties).

I quickly connected with companies that rented high end properties.  These gulf front homes rent for $5,000 to $15,000 per week in peak season. That’s not a typo.

So for rental companies that are getting 20-40% of each weekly rental as a fee for managing the property for the owner (again, not a typo), they have money to spend on marketing (photography being #1).  And photography is absolutely critical when 90% of the bookings are coming from out of state and those folks are making their vacation decisions based on photos they view online.  So…

I decided to contact and work with many of the rental companies that rent the higher end homes and some of the more exclusive / high end condos.  I also contacted several of the top producing real estate agents and real estate companies that deal with multi-million dollar listings. Then slowly got around to contacting builders, architects and interior designers.  Again, my goal with the rental companies was to tap into the turnover that was inevitable with them and the new properties they’d need shot yearly or rooms of units to reshoot because beds/bedding, furniture or repainting took place.  How did my little plan work?  Perfectly until the oil spill.

Rental companies have been getting vacationers calling in to cancel their May/June bookings due to watching the constant coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill on CNN, The Weather Channel, FOX, you name it.  National coverage on every media outlet including print/web.  Even if the impact is not as bad as they are predicting now, the damage for me is done.  These rental companies are playing it safe and canceling/postponing new shoots, indefinitely.  Some have resorted to just grabbing point and shoot pics for now to “wait and see what happens” with this oil spill.  I’m not out for good, but the outlook for this oil spill is bad enough that it is impacting MY clients.  Shit happens.  To me in this case.

Since moving to the Emerald Coast I’ve shot over 1000 properties.  But I didn’t bracket all those properties to then merge shots to HDR and then tonemap.  I’ve “only” shot about 700 properties employing a full HDR pipeline.  I’ve averaged about 20 shots per property so I’m probably as I type this crossing the 14,000 mark for tonemapped images from HDRs merged from brackets.  I’ve learned a few tricks along the way.

Obviously these rental companies are savvy.  There are many photographers in the area that shoot real estate so the rental companies can beat me up to some extent on pricing.  However,  for the level of work that I deliver, they can’t get cheaper. I make more money than any of the other real estate photographers in the area not employing a HDR pipeline.  Likewise, there are amazing architectural photographers that live here who can blow me away , but they charge far more than I do and use lots of lighting gear and/or professional level flash units.  They also take all day to stage and shoot a trophy property.  I’m the middle ground option here.  Not cheap, not expensive and you get a high quality product.  HDR allows me to get in and out of properties with only a camera bag and a tri-pod and move quickly through a shoot.

Tapping into those rental companies meant a constant flow of properties and when I got emails from followers of  this blog asking when am I going to do some kind of workshop, video training, personal training, … my response has always been… “someday, but I’m too busy shooting/editing”.

It was a great run.  Its not over, but this oil spill has spooked all the rental companies. In the last few days I’ve had 27 shoots cancelled.  This is going to be a hell of a test on me.  I have savings I put away for retirement and will likely have to tap into those if I can’t re-market myself rapidly with new clients.  I’ll likely start considering out of state shoots as well given there is no telling how long this oil spill impact will linger.

How this relates to HDR is that I will now have more time to spend testing all these apps for merging/tonemapping and review them.  I’ll also likely setup some kind of weekend workshop for those interested in learning how to shoot/edit high contrast scenes employing a High Dynamic Range Imaging pipeline.  I’m only 3-5 hours from Atlanta, Jacksonville, Birmingham, New Orleans and Mobile as cities go, but only a 3/4 day’s drive from Orlando and Tampa.  Those would likely be cities I’d hold a workshop in.

I’ll also be thinking long and hard about online training options.  Currently I”m assisting with a few of the Background Fundamentals Classes covering HDR basics over at http://www.FXPHD.com and I’ll be thinking about expanding my online presence to more online training for sure. I’ve never written a book and I have no contacts in that industry so I’m not sure that will be an option unless I decide to self publish.  Lots to think about in the coming days, but I won’t drag my feet.

Regardless.  The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill means I’ll be spending more time yapping about HDR both online and off.

I’ve already downloaded Photoshop CS5 beta and have been using it to test out the HDR Tools.  I’ll have more to share once I’ve used it more in depth tomorrow and Monday.  More to come…

I often get emails asking about which app to use for merging to HDR and/or which app to use for tonemapping.  That’s not an easy one to answer given I use various apps in my pipeline for various reasons.  It really varies (slightly) on what I’m shooting.  Pools, Interiors, Exteriors, etc.  My answer may change soon so I’ll let you all know once I’ve played with the new Photoshop CS5 HDR Pro tools and other apps I’m going to test/try again.

I won’t be reviewing all the apps out there, but I am about to explore the various HDR/Tonemapping options for mac/pc over the next 30 days.  For selfish reasons.  I want to see if there is a better way to do what I do right now to get better results.  Better for me is faster, more natural or both.

I’m happy with my current workflows (yes I have more than one).  But I know a lot of releases of various applications have occurred over the last 1-2 years.  Even though I keep an eye on what is out there I don’t test and play with all of them.  I’m about to start doing just that now to see if I can refine or improve my current somewhat proprietary/unique post workflow.

I definitely get the feeling that folks think I hate Photomatix Pro.  I don’t hate it folks, I just struggle with the amount of saturation and hue issues it creates during the merge/tonemapping process.  It is a very stable app and probably the best app to use for artistic and surreal images.  But something else about it makes it a no go most of the time that I don’t talk about much…

Photomatix Pro will CHANGE the pixel dimensions of your image depending on what camera you are using.   This makes it impossible for me to then bring in one frame from the capture later and overlay it in photoshop if I want to mask in something.  They don’t match.  Photomatix Pro does some kind of voodoo in the merge/tonemapping that causes the image to grow in width.  Now it’s only a couple of pixels, but it is just enough that even if you use Photoshop to try and align images…  they never will.  Because the pixels are added on one axis, not both.

Now if you have a camera like an origianl 5D or otherwise, you may not have experienced this issue.  With the D3 and other cameras I have… this is a problem for me.  It adds pixels on one axis when I save images from tonemapping.

Even with that downside, I have used Photomatix Pro and have delivered nearly 1000 commercial images using it.  If you wrestle with the sliders long enough you can get decent results for commercial work.

This gallery is from one shoot… not the whole shoot, just a handful from the shoot.  They were all merged/tonemapped in Photomatix Pro.  Probably more saturated than a lot of my work, but that was why I moved away from this app a few years back.  This particular builder liked the look he saw from another builder’s website that I had used Photomatix Pro on, so he asked for the same “results”.  So be it.  I also shot many other properties for him after this one.  So much so that he put up a new website last year and pretty much every gallery on the site I shot for him.  His website  is linked below as well.

PHOTOMATIX PRO EXAMPLES (GALLERY)
11 tonemapped images from one shoot (1200px wide)

Builder’s website (nearly entire site I shot for him)

Today I edited the HDR Timelapse sequence of the Las Vegas sunset.  I had shown one frame from the sequence over the weekend and posted a larger version previously as well.  This is one single tonemapped edit from the HDR Timelapse sequence. (Video link to Vimeo below).

Today I had a real estate shoot cancel, so I got a bunch of past real estate shots edited and then took some time to piece together the Las Vegas Sunset HDR Timelapse.  Because I chose to merge to hdr and tonemap that one single image over the weekend (above) using Photomatix Pro, I thought I’d use Photomatix Pro again for the entire sequence.  What the hell.  Its not for a client so a little over saturation won’t matter here.  I made a few mental mistakes in the pipeline because I generally use other apps, but the results are O.K. for government work  :)

This was the capture/post flow:

Nikon D3  + Nikon 85mm f/1.4D shot through my hotel window on a tripod utilizing the in camera HDR Timelapse (You can combine a timelapse with bracketing in the D3).  I chose to go with a 7AEB with 1EV steps and the camera was firing off that bracket every 15 seconds.  Of the 7AEB I killed off the final over exposed image of each bracket.  I felt adding that latitude would brighten the image too much.  So each merge to HDR was 6 shots spaced 1EV apart.  The total number of tonemapped shots was 90.  Basically covering a span of  22 mins 30 seconds worth of time during the sunset. Both the Merge to HDR and Tonemapping was done in the batch feature of Photomatix Pro.  I then took the tonemapped images into Final Cut Pro for time and color treatment before exporting for YouTube & Vimeo.

Because I shot this sequence in portrait mode, I opted to make slight color correction differences to two versions and post one video with both playing together.  I should have pushed on image a lot harder to show variation.  Now that I’ve watched it online it seems very subtle.

I also simultaneously shot a HDR Timelapse a foot away from the D3 with a Canon T2i in horizontal mode as wide as the kit lens will go (18mm for that EF-S, but on a crop body).  I shot for a full hour with the T2i.  About 15 minutes prior to setting up the D3 and the same after the D3 exhausted the compact flash I had in it.  It will be interesting to see those results versus the D3.

I’m no expert when it comes to compression/encoding.  I can only say that the video looks a hell of a lot better in FCP than online!

Vimeo 720p Version LINKED HERE (opens in a new window)